Continuous Delivery

Why CD?

  • Continuous Delivery is the ability to get changes of all types into production, or into hands of users, safely and quickly in a sustainable way.
  • Lets Understand Legecy Delivery
    • Receive the requirements
    • Build everything to spec
    • Send it to QA for testing
    • Deliver Everything
  • Failure, which is not an option its a promise. Instead preparing for Failure is optional
  • Why do We fail ?
    • The requirements are wrong
    • OR misunderstood
    • OR change before we can deliver
    • OR wont even work in production
  • What CD Mitigates
    • Removes uncertainty early
    • Reduces the cost of making change
    • Improves speed of quality feedback
    • Minimizes wasted efforts

Is It Just Tools?

  • Continuous delivery improves both delivery performance and quality and also helps improve culture and reduce burnout and deployment pain
  • However implementing these often requires rethinking everything
  • Change of Mindset needed,
    • Deliver First : Establish the ability to verify assumptions quickly and safely
    • Ability to deliver is out highest priority. Keep the pipeline green!
    • Small and frequent changes, not big bang releases
    • Automate!
    • Rapid feedback to improve hypotheses, not assumptions of success
    • Remove Toil and work smaller not work faster.
    • Breakdown communication silos and minimize handoffs
    • Build quality in. Quality is a process, not a job
  • Impact to Teams,
    • Improved Quality
    • Reduce process toil
    • Improved Teamwork
    • Improved Moral
    • Note: Teams that do not have birth to death ownership will struggle to deliver the quality outcomes.
  • Impact to Organization,
    • Improved communication
    • Improved collaboration
    • Improved value delivery
    • Happier Teams
    • Happier Customers
    • Ability to try new ideas with less cost or risk.
  • CD is much much more than just build and deploy. It represents an organization’s circulatory system.

Common Challenges

  • Challenges at Teams level,
    • “We automated the Build, We are doing CD!”, This mindset may not get expected output of CD
    • Testing Knowledge
    • Work Decomposition
    • Teamwork
    • Process overhead
  • Challenges at Organizational level,
    • Functional Silos
    • Lack of Good platform
    • Misaligned Goals
    • Weakly defined products

Exploring the Pipeline and Getting Started

  • CD is not “Automate what we have”, it needs to be planned well.

Continuous Pain

  • In Reality CD looks like below,

Continuous Delivery

Reference: https://learning.edx.org/course/course-v1:LinuxFoundationX+LFS180x+2T2022/home